Explorers Club

Explorers is a jointly run afterschool club here at SUN school with friends from our Church, St Marys Sulhamstead and from school.

It was started about 25 years ago by a teacher at the school and a couple of parents from the church. The aim was to explore the Christian faith in a fun and exciting way and to foster links between the school and the church. And it is still running with those aims today. The club is open to all children from SUN school from Year 1 to Year 6. It has been encouraging to see many of our old pupils going along to the Christian Union at The Willink, our main feeder secondary school. Here the Christian faith is explored and discussed along side eating cake! All children from Explorers and the school along with their families are always very welcome at the services at St Marys. Explorers are invited to take part in special services from time to time at church.

A typical session starts with a drink and a snack and a chance to relax after a busy day at school. We then play some games outside with Hide and Seek being all the time favourite. We explore a story from the bible and there is usually a craft or activity linked to this. We end our time together with a short reflection that includes a song and a prayer.

In recent times we have made prayer boxes for each classes worship area. The boxes contain crosses, candles, and different coloured drapes to reflect the colours of the church year. As well we made scrap books of the bible stories that accompany the School Values. We appreciated the help with the coloured cloth from friends at the church.

We spent a year doing a Bible overview from cover to cover using The Block Buster Bible. This book takes a look behind the scenes of the bible and uses the theme of films. Each week the children acted out the story using the clapper board and shouting Lights, Camera Action! We were thrilled to have the author Andrew Pritchard come and talk to us!

This school year we are exploring the Christian values of the school. We have just finishing considering how to be thankful and have been out and about in the school grounds.

A new half term and a new value to explore.

We started the term off by hearing the story from the Bible that goes with the school value of Friendship and Forgiveness. The parable of the Prodigal Son or the Lost Son is a great example to us of forgiveness and mending friendships that have broken. The children painted pebbles once again with this value on to hide around the village. Do keep your eyes open for them!

With this better weather we have been able to resume the all time favourite game at Explorers, Hide and Seek! The children never seem to tire of this game!

This last week we learnt about an amazing friendship between Ruth and her widowed mother in law. Ruth travelled to another country to support and look after Naomi and once there we saw how she was shown kindness and friendship from others. In our reflection we considered how we can be the best friend to our family and others we meet. Ruth was able to glean corn in the fields of Boaz and we had a go at collecting corn to use for our craft. We made pots with ears of corn in to help us remember the story and then we wrote the names of our friends and family on hearts. These pots can help us to be thankful for our friends and also help us pray for them.

It isn’t long till Mothering Sunday and everyone is welcome join the church family at St Marys on Sunday 15 th March at the 10.30 am service.

Who we are...

Sian Webb

Yvonne Cook

Rachel Belshaw

https://www.sunchurch.co.uk/